A mixture of sanctions and missile attacks has failed to dislodge Saddam Hussein. There is an
alternative approach

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ISRAEL is on the state department's collective mind as it
absorbs the report of the suicide bombing of 19 Israeli
teenagers outside a Tel Aviv disco. But the US foreign policy
establishment is also reacting to another fresh Middle East
setback.

The other day, France, China and Russia stymied a US-UK
initiative to curtail Saddam Hussein's oil smuggling and military
purchases, thereby buying the dictator yet more time to convert
Iraq to the Gulf's arms powerhouse. Rueful officials are now
sitting down to draw up what must be the umpteenth Iraq sanctions plan.

And to contemplate another path. --- between spats with UN partners -- officials at
both state department and Pentagon played host to the Iraqi National Congress, a
London-based group of exiled Iraqis dedicated to overthrowing Mr Saddam and voting in a
democratic government in Baghdad.

The idea of an exile force to counter Mr Saddam enjoys wide support on Capitol Hill, with
backers ranging from Joseph Lieberman, the former Democratic vice-presidential candidate,
to senator John McCain. After Mr Saddam ejected UN inspectors in 1998, big majorities in
both Houses voted $100m for democracy-building in the Iraq Liberation Act. But the Clinton
administration disbursed just a few millions, with only a fraction of that going to the INC.

Many in the Bush team by contrast seem inclined to join Congress in the push to proceed.
Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon is especially interested. And even those Bush appointees who
are not committed to the INC or its leader, the University-of-Chicago-trained mathematician
Ahmad Chalabi, are showing interest in a broader policy shift regarding the Middle East and
developing countries. Waiting for Mr Saddam to run scared is increasingly perceived as a
loser's game.

They wonder whether the traditional habit of treating dictators on a par with democratically
elected heads of state continues to be the best policy. Perhaps it is time to back efforts to
build representative governments in troubled locales. Thus the emphasis by Colin Powell,
secretary of state, on African "democracy-building".

Career officers at the state department have not focused on this larger question. But they
vehemently denounce Mr Chalabi, whom they deem a divisive upstart, and his Iraq
resistance cause. Support for political resistance within Iraq would at the very least be
pointless, they say. At its worst, such an effort would infuriate nations from Saudi Arabia to
Egypt and do incalculable damage to the US - think Bay of Pigs.

Still, given the news emanating from Baghdad, the very least that can be said is that the old
policy of sanctions-plus-the- occasional-airstrike seems ripe for review. Consider its three
tenets:

UN sanctions are the best way to stop Saddam. This position had its logic 10 years ago,
following the UN-led Gulf War victory. But sanctions and inspections since then have been
an unremitting failure. In 1998, Unscom's own researchers reported that the Iraqi regime had
"weaponised" deadly VX nerve gas, installing it in artillery shells and missile warheads.
Biological and nuclear weapons projects are also proceeding apace: Kidhir Hamza, a
defecting physicist, recently published a book on the nuclear arms programme. Some reports
say Saddam's nuclear weapons will be ready to fire next year.

Money is, alas, fungible and Iraq is using "oil for food" programme cash to snatch up military
items from Amman. Western capitals have stuck to the sanctions tack because it is
supposed to preserve unity among UN powers. But as this week's embarrassing UN split
demonstrated, even this justification has fallen apart lately.

Supporting the INC will infuriate the Saudis and upset the rest of the Middle East.That
argument may have it backwards. One can equally argue that it is Mr Saddam who is the
destabilising force, providing dramatic evidence that anti-democratic tyrants will be
negotiated with, not spurned. While Mr Saddam never delivered on his promise to send 6m
soldiers to fight against Israel, his agents have reportedly handed out $10,000 payments to
families of Palestinians who martyred themselves in suicide actions against Israelis.

The INC enjoys no real support within Iraq or elsewhere. INC supporters include the main
Kurdish parties in Iraqi Kurdistan. The INC has also had help from eminent people such as Mr
Hamza, who joined them in their visit to the Pentagon. To be sure, the group's limited budget
has prevented it from providing military training in Iraq - but it has managed to relay valuable
information about Mr Saddam's abuses, just as Charter 77 did from the eastern European
bloc.

As for the argument that Mr Chalabi is not influential, this is predictable. Resistance leaders
nearly always seem like pathetic fronts for propaganda efforts at the beginning. During the
cold war years the exiled legations of the old Baltic states were treated as a political joke in
both London and New York. Yet when the time came, these superannuated ambassadors
helped to inspire revolutions at home.

The diplomatic affection for negotiating on the basis of the status quo is understandable.
Diplomats would rather deal with a stable government, even an undemocratic one, than with
dreamy, bedraggled individuals more likely to get themselves killed than to topple an armed
regime. America's foreign policy establishment also fears repeats of democracy-building
failures in Cuba and Vietnam.

Overcoming such collective bad memories would be a challenge for the Bush team. Yet,
difficult as it is to fathom, there are worse outcomes than the Bay of Pigs --- a wide nuclear or
chemical attack by oil-rich Iraq being one. Superpowers spooked by old failures cannot
prevent new
ones.

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